Refusing to Creep: Answering the Impulse to Soar
Created at: August 24, 2025
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. — H. G. Wells
The Call to Rise
At the outset, this line—often misattributed to H. G. Wells—belongs to Helen Keller. Its force lies in the moral refusal to live below one’s felt capacity. To ‘creep’ is to accept constriction and play small; to ‘soar’ is to honor an inner summons toward fuller agency and contribution. The sentence works like a compass: once the needle swings toward possibility, consent to diminishment becomes a kind of self-betrayal. Thus the aphorism does not glorify recklessness; rather, it marks the moment when responsibility to potential outweighs the comfort of caution.
Helen Keller’s Defiant Context
The sentiment gains authority from Keller’s life. In The Story of My Life (1903), she recounts the 1887 breakthrough at the water pump with Anne Sullivan and the long climb that followed—college at Radcliffe, public advocacy, and prolific writing. For someone deafblind to insist on soaring was not metaphor alone; it was a daily praxis of learning, travel, and persuasion. Precisely because she knew constraint intimately, her refusal to ‘creep’ reads as a courageous ethic: acknowledge limitation, but do not enthrone it.
Psychology of the Impulse
Psychologically, the impulse to soar aligns with intrinsic motivation. Self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985/2000) shows that autonomy, competence, and relatedness energize growth; when these needs awaken, compliance feels like crawling. Likewise, Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset (2006) explains why challenges entice rather than repel those who expect abilities to develop. Conversely, learned helplessness (Seligman, 1975) captures the deadening slide into creep-mode after repeated frustration. Read together, these findings suggest Keller’s maxim is not mere rhetoric; it names a robust human drive toward expansion.
When Soaring Meets Resistance
Yet aspiration does not unfold in a vacuum. Social and structural barriers can tether even the strongest wings. Consider Bessie Coleman, who, barred from U.S. flight schools, learned French and earned her pilot’s license in 1921 in France before barnstorming across America. Her path illustrates a larger pattern: when institutions say creep, determined people re-route and rise anyway. Movements for civil rights and inclusion similarly transform private impulse into public action, converting the desire to soar into collective leverage.
Echoes Across Literature and Myth
Literature has long wrestled with this tension. Emerson’s Self-Reliance (1841) urges nonconformity as a duty to one’s genius, while Thoreau warns of ‘quiet desperation’ when we settle for less. Ovid’s tale of Daedalus and Icarus reminds us that flight demands craft as well as courage: wax melts when ambition outruns preparation. These echoes complicate Keller’s charge without weakening it; taken together, they argue for audacity disciplined by prudence.
Turning Impulse Into Sustainable Flight
Finally, the ethic matures in practice. Start where the adjacent possible lies (Johnson, 2010): stretch slightly beyond current competence, build feedback loops, and compound small wins into altitude. Pair bold goals with safety rails—mentors, prototypes, and time-boxed experiments—so that daring becomes repeatable rather than ruinous. In this way, we respect the inner summons without mistaking speed for wisdom. The result is a life that neither crawls in fear nor crashes in hubris, but learns, steadily, to soar.